**

People go to great lengths not to be here — that place of having relinquished everything you dreamed of for years for the sake of a greater value, of walking through the worst fear and pain you can imagine because you know you have to speak your truth. Trudging home through whirling snow the other night, I considered that if we can’t be personally courageous, and brave this nauseous, chilling, near-catatonic I’d-rather-die-than-feel-this terror and grief in our private lives, what will we do if the Nazis or the Fascists come again? Really? How do we learn to stand up in the face of grave fear and loss? Especially when it’s safer to mind our own business?

Here in the United States we live in a time and a culture of a sort of extreme libertarianism, where individual rights are paramount and responsibilities to one another are almost nil. I talked to a charming elderly man from Surrey, England on a plane a few years ago who was horrified to hear that while there was no limit to the wealth an individual American CEO could acquire, there was also no safety net available to a destitute person with cancer. That would never happen in his commie pinko socialist country.

Looking after people is a “feminine” value; sensing that we are part of a web rather than a dog-eat-dog hierarchy is often part of the experience of owning a womb (on which someone else may, in fact, depend). We have to be able to anticipate and interpret the needs of tiny, helpless creatures who can’t talk to us or tell us what’s wrong, so our empathic and subtle emotional capacities are turned up to eleven. We read others; we feel them; we feel for them. In an socially isolationist culture, this can expose us to tremendous scorn — instead of the respect we may more accurately deserve — because we’re seen as weak, hysterical, irrational, even crazy.

This time, I trusted my craziness.

**

The introjected Critic starts flogging me immediately, with help from his buddy The Rationalist, for following such a dubious compass. Together they make me the queen of self-second-guessing. It was they who bound and gagged me all the way through college, leaving me mute in a forgotten corner. Shut up, you stupid bitch! Who do you think you are? What do you think you know? Unless you have all the airtight evidence in your briefing file and a lineup of impeccable witnesses, you should keep your goddamn mouth shut. No one could possibly take your unscientific ravings seriously! You’re likely to get slapped with a hefty fee, or sued for libel.

I wept yesterday, gratefully, hearing personal-development guru Michael Skye say in an online audio recording that the emotionality of women is our greatest gift, that the depth of our pain in relationships indicates the depth to which we can love, and that this “gift” of ours is the source of our true beauty and power.

It makes perfect sense, then — assuming Michael is correct — why Damien Rice’s emotionally rich music would restore me to such a strong sense of self, and why I would have such a bastard of a time explaining this to a male reader.

(A momentary aside here: where are all the women out there? I’d really like to hear from you. Not that I’m ungrateful for the few vociferous gentlemen who want to engage, but sometimes things feel a little unbalanced.)

I’m supposed to remain “reasonable”…and nice. A nice, reasonable female, who isn’t too convinced of what’s what (certainly not by anything “irrational”), and doesn’t assert anything too strongly. It’s already hard enough for me to be firm about anything, even when dealing with my friend Natalie’s defiant teenager, who is constantly sneaking out, getting in trouble, and breaking promises to her mother. I’m always asking myself: how is it my place to judge anyone else’s behavior, or tell him or her what to do?

Yet I’ve always admired those bitch-goddesses of tough love in movies and books, who lay it all out for the protagonist, three-quarters of the way through, telling him just how it is, boyyy, so you better straighten up that sorry ass before it’s grass. You’re runnin out of foolin, as the Queen of Soul sang, and I ain’t lyin.

They remind me of Ms. Cribb.

**

Ms. Cribb was my volleyball coach and modern dance teacher in high school. She was a petite African-American whippet of a woman, lean and powerful at nearly fifty, and leagues sexier than any of us fresh-faced teenagers on the dance floor. I had never encountered anyone who so perfectly embodied the prototypical coach-as-caring-hardass. She made sure we all knew we were valued, but she drove us relentlessly, and when we screwed up everybody had to drop and give her ten (pushups). We wanted to do our best for her, to push beyond our known limits, to make mamma proud. Her ironclad certainty was like our anchor; she didn’t have a tentative or wavering bone in her body. We felt her love, and that love was tough.

Sometimes in life, the Ms. Cribbs are absolutely necessary. In sports, in parenting teens like Natalie’s, and in dealing with anyone lapsing into unconscious or destructive behavior, the “whatever floats your boat” response just doesn’t cut it. Not, at least, if you give a shit. And bear in mind that this is coming from someone who wriggled her way out from under an authoritarian religious structure. I don’t ordinarily welcome the imposition of external judges, or the presumptuousness of intervention.

But Jessie Cribb saw diamonds in us; she wasn’t going to let us get away with slumping through practice like big lumps of coal. That’s the essence of a good coach or teacher: to see students’ potential, to believe in them, and to kick their asses out of their familiar, dead-end ruts.

Most of us want, whether we know it or not, to be the best possible version of ourselves; the hero, as John Barth said, of our own life story. But when we’re acting less than heroic, we may need a Ms. Cribb.

**

It was outrageous, really, from the standpoint of reason, of social protocols and the dictates of politeness, and what typically passes for common sense, to do what I did, to say what I said to someone without direct provocation. But I felt the emotional reality of a situation in my bowels, rather than connecting all the dots in my brain — although some of the indications were there too. I knew what was what, the way a wolf or a bat knows what’s what, the way my mother knows (whether I want her to or not) when I’ve been crying. My intuitive pointillism coalesced into a coherent whole, and the picture was not a pretty one. I shivered with the awareness of an old, intransigent, endlessly painful motif, wounded by my investment in the scene, tired of paying the unrewarding cost of admission. I deserved better. Everyone deserved better. All at once, I grasped with sharp-edged clarity that I could step outside the frame. I could opt out of the picture, and in that freedom, I could say what I saw.

So I spoke my truth. I took an outrageous, offensive, chance-murdering stand. I dived on a grenade, giving up on life as I’d known it (or hoped it could be) and consigning myself to an indefinite purgatory of grief (and possibly being hated), for the sake of something more important and possibly more real. I stood up for traditionally “feminine” values like empathy, and universal values like respect for self and others. I stood up for myself, painfully yet irrevocably realizing that sometimes you have to choose. I stood up for women, with our “unreasonable,” relational, emotional natures. And lastly, I stood up for the best possible version of a lapsed hero. Trusting myself…no questions, and no apologies.

Please-won’t-you-like-me little AlienBaby went hardass bitch-goddess for once, and pulled a Ms. Cribb.

To be that tough, I had to summon all my resources, and I cried my way through it — breaking every personal rule I had ever held about maintaining bonds, like a sister finally kicking her crack-addicted brother out of the house. I thought about how at my old job I could have continued to ingratiate myself by telling the owner only what she wanted to hear, and being a good little girl, but it’s not always the best thing to tell people only what they want to hear. I had to tell myself things I didn’t want to hear, ultimately. What do you do when you see no self-respecting alternative? All of the above could describe, to a certain extent, the essence of what happened at the studio.

And the last thing I wanted to do was leave a place that was like home to me.

**

My life coach friend applauds these radical acts as progress, as the emergence of a more aware aspect of myself into the driver’s seat. He (like many others in the personal development field) has always insisted that life shows up for us differently when we show up for it differently. I do think I’ve done much to dislodge the massive boulder of undeserving that’s been sitting in the middle of my road…but I lack his confidence that it will make that huge of a difference, or that I have the wherewithal to live through my current, almost overwhelming fear and grief. Employers haven’t exactly been beating down my door in this nose-diving economy…and having surrendered my dearest, fiercest desires, living within the limbo of these solitary, bean-eating grey days, I have less of a sense of purpose now than I ever have. Where do I go now? What do I do? I can’t think forward; I can’t look back.

Chop wood, carry water.

**

No, I don’t want to go into what happened in more detail. You have the feeling of it, you have Ms. Cribb, let that be enough. I will say that if anyone starts quoting Stephen Stills at me right now, love the one you’re with and all that, I will have to virtually restrain myself from virtually punching said individual in the virtual nose. Now is not the time.

The only man-fantasy I’m willing to entertain at present (which is still far more likely to happen than anything else I’ve wanted lately) is of literally bumping into a certain Irish troubadour coming out of a downtown hotel. Oh my God, it’s you!

We start to chat — he is, as he appears in interviews, down-to-earth, warm, and unassuming — and it turns out he’s staying through tomorrow as a surprise solo act in one of our innumerable music festivals. So I bring him to that pub in Lower Downtown that has seventy-five beers on tap, even though I never touch the stuff, and I nurse a glass of wine as we talk for hours and hours about life and love and music and how much better Ireland is about taking care of people, and then we wind up going back to his hotel for a spontaneous, sensual evening of amicable international relations.

This scrappy, passionate leprechaun of a man makes love, not surprisingly, with the unsqueamish gusto of a horny lesbian, and is quite possibly the best I’ve ever had. We order room service in the morning and eat honeydew melon in bed, and I get to watch his gig in the afternoon from stageside…and on the plane later maybe he’ll pick up his guitar and start to write a song about a fading flower in a Western town, loved a man who was scattered all around. So at least for my troubles I gain a measure of immortality in the material world, like that sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, and I have an extraordinary memory and a singular story to tell my grand-nieces and nephews about a man who by then should be a legend, even if he’s not.

Like I’ve told you, I’ve got quite an imagination. But honestly, the only (other) guy I’d say yes to right now is a stormy little singer from County Kildare.

Well I could throw it out, and I could live without
And I could do it all for you
I could be true…

This has got to stop.

Wherever you may hail from, I thank you for joining me on my bumpy journey, and for your (overwhelmingly positive) feedback, both on-site and via email. Who knew that someone besides myself would want to gaze at my navel?

**

This month marks another anniversary as well: three years ago this month I fell madly in love.

I’ll bet you regulars think you know where I’m going with this, and you’re wrong. Yes, it was March 2006 when I took a fateful tumble for a certain someone…but at the same time I was discovering an incomparable young Irish singing/songwriting phenomenon known as Damien Rice.

Only days ago did I return to my beloved after a long absence; I had put away most of my more evocative music about a year ago, in an attempt to banish unnecessary sadness from my life for the purposes of enlightenment. But hearing his good friend from The Frames, Glen Hansard, delivering similarly goosebump-inducing lyrics with equal passion in the movie Once, put him at the forefront of my mind again. I started cruising YouTube for videos of Glen one day, and wound up unearthing this devastating live rendition by Damien of the 9 album song Elephant.

It felt like coming home.

**

Damien delivers a quiver that only the best poets can; he’s like a street Heaney meets Jeff Buckley, strumming the battered guitar he inherited from Nick Drake. His classic, slightly nasal Irish tenor can go from a hearty blast out of the chest to the hoarsest whisper in the space of a second; his anguished falsetto can elicit tears faster than a drunken pub sing-along of Danny Boy. You long to hear him pronounce words like Connemara or Ballyknockan with that lush Irish brogue. But it’s not just his amazing voice, it’s everything: his sense of the harmonics of emotion, the vibrations of naked yearning expressed through chord and melody, the intelligent, melancholy, confrontational poetry of his lyrics. He can howl “horny” or “fuck you” and make the words sound sublime. He reminds me of why I wanted to write, why anyone makes art in the first place.

My faithful reader in Germany accuses me of being too stubbornly stuck on one man, but I will say this: if Mr. Rice showed up on my lawn tomorrow, yelling my name like Stanley Kowalski, I’d be down there in a heartbeat.

The YouTube comments by hetero women about this comely if elfin powerhouse of a man are of course predictable, but I love to read what some of the straight men say: “I think I just went gay for a minute,” jokes one, while another gushes “I am a man and very hetero, and a guitar player myself. But seriously, if I could marry this man, I would, I would turn gay lol (sic) it doesn’t matter life would be complete being around Damien all day anyway.” The comment that makes me laugh out loud reads “I would hump him, he’s so powerful, I’m not gay but seriously, let the dry humping commence.” They don’t know what to do with another dude whose songs arouse shivers so profound and visceral they don’t know whether to cry or to come.

Some artists can cross all boundaries, and touch the raw, pulsating core of a human being. It’s an extraordinary gift.

**

Damien’s first major-release album O was my soundtrack to that spring and summer, and will forever be linked with the events of those warm, heady months. Delicate, its first track, unfailingly evokes for me the image of shoots pushing up through damp ground in early-morning sunlight, while The Blower’s Daughter will always send me back to a beautiful wood-floored studio glowing red in the late afternoon, watching Sonny hold a Warrior pose like a yogic Michelangelo. I can’t take my eyes off of you. (The first dozen or so times I listened to that song, I could not stop crying — I had never heard such a pure and perfect keen of longing.) Cold Water is quiet desolation tinged with faith, an appeal to both God and Other in the face of impossibility, hope against hope (which would turn out, at least momentarily, not to be in vain). I could go on, but suffice it to say that every song on that album is exquisite, and personally meaningful to me.

The only comparable period and soundtrack in my life that I can think of is probably my freshman year of college, falling in love with León accompanied by the heretofore undiscovered magic of Cat Stevens. Appropriately, his music represented youth itself, unbroken idealism charging heedlessly forward. I can’t keep it in, I gotta let it out. Two fine people should love each other.

Damien’s magic, twenty years later, lay in the pathos of broken and wiser experience reaching out to take one more risk, one more time. Love taught me to lie…it’s not hard to fall, when you float like a cannonball. I’m not a miracle and you’re not a saint.

His unflinching, sometimes brutal honesty is part of what makes his songs so compelling and beautiful. They shimmer with ragged authenticity.

**

Whether or not my absentee friend is a miracle, I’m not a saint, and I’ve failed at Damien-grade honesty. I like the image of an iceberg one of my commenters used: all you know about things is the visible tip I’ve shared. There’s a whole lot more underwater, and it doesn’t all make me look like some sterling Victorian heroine tragically seduced by the obligatory dashing cad. (Although I do appreciate your chivalrous impulses.)

No, it actually felt good, a couple of posts ago, to own my own ambivalence, and to point out the tinted filter created by my own insecurities. The things I’ve obsessed about endlessly don’t necessarily have a firm base in reality, other than what happened one summer, and what I, of all people, have no business judging. So don’t go taking all my fears as facts. I feel like I have to come clean about my own barely explicable caprice.

Briefly: only days after a blessed encounter with my beautiful friend, during the first flush of summer, I departed for a preplanned trip to Italy. I had promised to keep him and a small group of close friends abreast of my activities abroad with a weekly email travel diary.

Well, by the second week, my readers were being treated to tales of an attractive young Englishman I’d met in the lakes region. Overnight, I became desperately and fecklessly infatuated with the bloke: he was funny, caustic, and just the sort of ridiculing intellectual who makes me strive so hard to get Daddy’s approval. (He even dated a graduate of my college.) I made no secret of my ardor to anyone on my list, blathering on and on about it endlessly, expecting it to be my grand Foreign Affair. (It wasn’t.)

So, basically, after finally getting close to a gorgeous man with a warm heart and an emotional vocabulary, whom I had summoned out of the ether and then proceeded to coax all spring long, I went right back to chasing my father — publicly — albeit on a different continent.

Who’s the asshole now?

The strange thing was that the whole time I maintained the unshakable, if “irrational,” conviction that our connection was such that it could survive all circumstances and mutations of form…as if he really were, in some spiritual sense, family. I had said as much before, and he may have believed it: he was taken aback and sorry when I reacted violently (and hypocritically) to his own summer misadventures. Here in the States, he had been busy making like Wilt Chamberlain, reliving earlier, wilder days. (A counselor friend of mine observed very counselor-esquely that it seemed as if after touching on intimacy, we both reverted to older, more pathological ways of being.)

Anyway, before you go judging my erstwhile buddy as just another faithless man-slut, bear in mind who else flaked out completely. Yes, women adore the man, and he adores them, but he did commit himself to his last significant other once they got serious. I can’t point to something similarly redeeming in my own recent history.

**

But speaking of irrational convictions…

Last week I started to seriously entertain (for the umpteenth time) every voice, both external and internalized, urging me to get reasonable, to trust outside judges and the dictates of five-sense empiricism, and accept that I’m just another daft female making up all kinds of crazy shit about the way things are. Don’t I know I’ll never be anything but a miserable failure until I train myself to believe only hard facts, and trust other people’s authority and word over my “impressions?”

Like a child I lay on the bed and sobbed from my diaphragm, feeling chills of pain from this negation vibrating through the marrow of my bones, threatening to shatter me. It was as if my brain were trying to kill my entire being from the inside. This was, as Carol Gilligan has said (as did I, in Sing, Goddess), about so much more than one circumscribed situation. This was about my ability to trust myself, or not, to be able to navigate through the world with the “feminine,” intuitive, instinctual, intangible capacities and tools I have always used, and to be able to say that I know what I know, regardless of what the official line is. It’s a struggle I’ve revisited again and again for as long as I can remember.

Sometimes I’ve felt like Angelina Jolie in Changeling, institutionalized and pumped full of dope for saying “That is not my son.”

But it really wasn’t her son.

**

Later, stumbling to the computer, tear-stained and exhausted from trying to vivisect still-living parts of myself, I started searching for music on YouTube by Glen Hansard. I remembered how Falling Slowly and other numbers from the film made me weep gently with the recognition, the reassurance that someone else embraced unsayable emotional realities and could produce almost palpable variations in the rarefied air around a song. I was already getting somewhat soothed by Glen’s music when I saw Damien in the ‘related videos’ column, and clicked on him instead.

Immediately I was flooded with forgotten gratitude for his passion, his acuity, his humming incandescent connection to unseen worlds. I felt myself growing physically stronger, as if the music were transfusing me. Even the most woeful complexities of emotions he brought forth I welcomed like old, formerly estranged friends. Some emboldened voice within me asserted this is who you are. This is where you belong. You don’t have to force yourself to be different…fuck that!!!

It’s something I love in Rilke, too, and numerous other poets: the masterful evocation of what the tools of ordinary perception and reason invariably miss. Somewhere between a trembling note and an original turn of phrase like stones taught me to cry (which makes no logical sense) a delicate universe blooms, populated by whispering existences seen best from the corner of the eye or felt with a sixth sense. As if a portal had suddenly opened up, between the prosaic everyday world that we assume is the only real one and a hidden dimension of limitless beauty that reminds us of how ephemeral our lives truly are.

If that makes no sense, it’s because I’m trying to use words to describe something for which words are almost entirely inadequate. It’s Laurie Anderson’s famous line about trying to dance about architecture.

**

I honed my critical mind to defend myself at the dinner table, but I never got out of fifty books of philosophy what I get out of five lines of Wordsworth. I’m a poet by nature, which makes me by default a madwoman. We’re not journalists; we rely on the messages we get from unconfirmed sources, rumors, the movement of birds. Our bones ache when it’s going to rain. We watch expressions cross faces, the tilt of a head or the placement of an arm, that say the opposite of the words being spoken. We see desire flash in his eyes, and doubt cloud hers. We contemplate the stillness of trees, and listen to see if they speak. There is always more here than meets the eye.

What I really need is what makes me bleed, sings Damien on the haunting track Volcano. It was by pain, after all, that he was driven and enabled to produce works of such deep resonance. If we were all suddenly filled with the nirvanic bliss of oneness, I wonder, would there be any more art, any more reason to confront and grapple with our relationship to the world and other people? Probably not. But what the best artists accomplish through their struggle, ironically enough, is an experience of union for their audience — who get to see or feel or know what the artist sees or feels or knows. In doing so, they no longer feel so separate.

“You do not have to be good,” writes Mary Oliver in Wild Geese. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Defiant words, choosing vulnerable, fallible humanness over the pursuit of perfection. “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”

I will do just that, by ending with a poem I wrote during a comparable time two years ago when I despaired of everything I thought I knew and everything I knew I wanted. (Another irony: in order to write about my loss of faith in imagination and other vital intangibles, I had to access my imagination and other vital intangibles.)

**

Tie a Knot and Hold On

No place in the world you belong,
and it doesn’t want your gifts,

those labors you laid
at the feet of your wanting
with a pure heart,
your blood offerings.

The sun is too bright
and beauty is nowhere beneath it,

only the tired faces of people
you wouldn’t want to be,
much as you don’t want to be
yourself.

None quicken the heart
or bring the surfaces alive
with gladness.

There is a kind of exhaustion
born of waiting too long
for a star that appears for an hour,

when the darkness is endless
and hard to love.

In this barren landscape,
this exile, beyond faith,
beyond hope,

sit still by the swings
and watch children at play.

Remember that time
before disappointments
and burdens
arrested your skyward arc

and take heart from those
who have not yet lost
that delight, in imagined

heroics, their kingdoms
of sand.

The Birth of Pleasure brings to light the experience of young boys and adolescent girls who, in adapting to the rigid and rationalistic framework of patriarchy, are effectively silenced about what they “see, feel and know” through those supposedly more “feminine” capacities of intuition, empathy, and emotional attunement. When I first read the book, I wept; it was like reading the history of my struggle with my father, many, many men, and in some ways the whole world.

So much of what I perceive filters in through these unofficial channels, unsupported by fact, “indefensible.” Confronted with my Harvard-educated, emotionally disconnected father’s capital-K Knowing, I frequently came off as weak, foolish, or hopelessly fanciful; my information was illegitimate, received through a faulty and “irrational” navigational system that often contradicted the Official Story. To compensate, I strove to become a master of the rational, strove to become legitimate, even going so far as to get a degree in philosophy at a school populated and run by more atheistic versions of my father. I tried very hard to belong there, but it always felt as if I were…well, an alien, forced to communicate in a dry, poetry-free language that didn’t even admit concepts central to my experience.

Something in me always resisted, however, always felt there was a baby in the scornfully discarded bathwater.

**

Carol Gilligan weaves her stories of couples in therapy and children in the classroom together with the ancient myth of Psyche and Cupid. It’s a tale that comes very close to tragedy, with a heroine who has to make her way through confusion, fear, the fear-based stories of others, abandonment, suicidal impulses, and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. She is beaten by Venus’s handmaidens, Sadness, Habit, and Trouble, until she is unable to speak. All because she refuses to adhere to a role others have chosen for her, and because she insists on seeing Cupid in the light. (I don’t think it’s such a stretch to say that this is what can happen to women within patriarchal culture who violate the rules by trusting themselves and saying what they see, feel, and know.) Seeing Cupid is what is not allowed; he leaves her crying in the dust when she violates his rule and lights the lamp to look at him.

The author introduces us to Eileen, a client in her private practice who feels crazy for picking up on an intensity of feeling between herself and the husband who is thinking of separating from her. Initially she says “He’s no more right than I am about it…it’s his reality, and then my reality.” Gilligan, asking further questions that aim to access Eileen’s non-rational knowing regarding the situation, concludes “If he is saying that your relationship lacks intensity and intimacy and you are picking up the vibes of fire and chemistry between you, then it’s not his reality and your reality, but reality and not-reality.” Eileen sits up and becomes animated; she proceeds to voice her feeling that the opposite of what her husband is saying is true. The intensity is precisely why he is withdrawing from her.

“I don’t know how to talk about this kind of knowing,” says Gilligan, “since it so readily seems suspect. It is the way animals know. Through vibrations. Something that passes between people. We pore over novels and poems because this is what writers put into words. Truths that have until recently escaped the nets put out by science.” A recent article in Salon by Laura Miller (about C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, of all things) actually touched upon this same phenomenon by comparing the world of pre-verbal infants and toddlers with that of our animal friends.

**

It’s frankly heartbreaking to read Gilligan’s accounts of four-year-old boys — who have not yet been initiated into the stoic silences of traditional masculinity — and their vociferous intimacy with their preschool friends and their parents. They say things to their mothers like “Mommy, you have a happy voice, but I also hear a little worried voice.” They are tremendously tuned in emotionally, contrary to the popular belief about boys’ obtuseness. They like to talk about their “buddies” with their daddies, and the fathers, in a particularly poignant passage in the book, worry about what will happen to their sons’ “spunk” and their “sensitive side.” They seem to be at a loss as to what to do; their sons bring up in them the uncomfortable memory of their own dissociation, their own tragic narrative.

Adolescent girls, at least, have the advantage of having acquired greater language skills; they are better able to speak about and remember having to choose between being in relationship (being their authentic selves) and having relationships (fitting an image of womanhood that won’t challenge the status quo). “If I were to say what I was feeling and thinking,” says seventeen-year-old Iris, “no one would want to be with me, my voice would be too loud. But you have to have relationships.” And as thirteen-year-old Tracy puts it, “When we were nine, we were stupid…we were honest.”

This developmental difference is perhaps why the greater burden of speaking about these unspeakable things, of restoring love, authentic connection, and the lost pieces of our humanness, falls upon women — much as Rilke predicted it would in his Letters to a Young Poet:

This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it…This advance…will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman.

Over and over again Gilligan hears from women how insane and out of touch they feel when they are abruptly dropped like a hot potato, following what they felt as shared joy, connection, and chemistry with a man. “While she may have seemed crazy or pathetic,” Gilligan says of one client, “like Psyche holding on to Cupid, in danger of losing herself, she was holding onto a core sense of self, her ability to register her experience.” Equally distressing as the loss of love itself is the self-doubt it engenders, the fear that one’s inner compass is hopelessly broken. “It’s a fight,” says Eileen, “at the foundation, in the arenas that are most important to me, my relationships with other people…how I read people and how I read where we are in terms of intimacy. I value that more than anything…to fight there, I mean, it’s fighting for your life.”

For the men’s part, as Gilligan writes in a section about the Michael Ondaatje novel The English Patient — whose protagonist is quite literally a man burned beyond recognition — “The pattern of men turning away from love, leaving without saying a word, suggests that they have already been burned. It is a history that bears the hallmarks of trauma: a heightened vigilance, a loss of voice, the inability to tell one’s story.”

**

Sitting at the dinner table adjacent to my father, I often felt a profound and nameless frustration that ended in despair. I know now that it was precisely my own loss of voice, my inability to tell my own story, that sank me into many hopeless and resentful silences. I would probably have never have worked so hard on my writing if I had felt in any way understood and honored by this all-important man. Later I would feel crazy, shamed, and devastated when, time and again, men would either cut me off completely or tell me my reading of their feelings was flat-out wrong. That is not what I meant at all, as the T.S. Eliot poem goes, that is not it, at all…

This is probably why Max Vujevic’s undeniably thunderous heartbeat (mentioned in my last post) was so validating. The body, at least, doesn’t lie. Although I’ve actually been told an erection was nothing personal. No, the violence with which Max pushed me away matched the violence with which he embraced me. There was definitely more going on there than I’ll ever fully know. But something was clearly going on.

In recent weeks I’ve found myself lapsing into crestfallen silence at the table of a surrogate father figure, and struggling once more to translate my experience into the foreign language of my Dead White Men’s college with a former classmate. Like Psyche allowed a visit with her sisters, I’ve listened to another woman’s fearful story about reality that challenged my self-trust, and I’ve wondered about my own sanity, reviewing my experiences of being left crying in the dust. The feelings aroused are the same frustration and despair the young girl sitting beside her father experienced thirty years ago, that mute hopeless surrender to a louder and more powerful voice.

**

How does the story end? You may ask. What happens to Psyche? After completing several seemingly impossible labors with the intervention of a helpful natural world, she is required by Venus (the goddess of love) to travel to Hades, and to ask a favor of Persephone, queen of the underworld. Like the heroes of patriarchal civilization, Odysseus and Aeneas, she has to find the courage to make her way through the land of the dead while alive. Existential psychotherapist and Renaissance man Rollo May once wrote in The Cry for Myth that one has to go through hell to get to heaven, and this is no less true for Psyche. It’s only after she has completed this tricky journey (and nearly been killed by her own curiosity) that Cupid returns to her. Granted immortality by Jupiter, Psyche gives birth to a daughter named Pleasure.

I have to admit, it’s kind of nice to read about a Hero’s Journey for chicks.

What I suppose I take from all that is this: Keep walking through fear. Do the thing, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, that you think you cannot do. If you refuse to be silenced and defeated, the forces of nature will find gentle ways to support you.

**

Gilligan begins her book with the image of water, likening it to love. It is the softest thing in the world, but it can wear through stone. Vulnerability, in a world built on power politics and competition, is viewed as a fatal weakness; emotional sensitivity is a liability. Yet we can see every day where the paradigm of power politics, the values of a patriarchal culture, have left us. It may be that the transformation of the world begins with women — and men — who dare to recover their lost voices, the voices of those tuned-in girls and boys who knew instinctively how to read the vibrations of interrelatedness, how to be authentic in relationship, how to love.